


embers and ashes

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2014 [7]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Community: wishlist_fic, Dark, Dreamwalking, Everyone's favourite psycho dreampals, Gen, Hale fire, Horror, Nightmares, Prompt Fic, Revenge, Revenge is kind of a thing, Violence, idek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-19
Packaged: 2018-03-02 05:41:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2801630
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Peter dreams and Loki watches.</p>
            </blockquote>





	embers and ashes

**Author's Note:**

> Avamclean asked for Thor/Teen Wolf - Peter– “Father has his beasts, Geri and Freki, but Loki finds the dual nature of werewolves far more interesting pets.”
> 
> This might just... scrape the intended direction of the post, but I hope you like it anyway? This year, I can't seem to stop apologizing.

Loki smells fire. 

He is aware that he is asleep, the way he always is. Sleeping and waking are states of the mind and Loki has mastered his own centuries ago.

And yet, he smells fire in a dreamscape lab, where none should be. 

He ignores it for a while and gets woken by Thor throwing himself bodily on his brother’s bed. His nose itches.

+

The next time he smells fire and smoke is when he is dreamwalking in his son’s cave, watching the boy play, eager as a pup, with a rodent that lost its way and wandered into his territory. 

Father doesn’t allow him physical contact to Fenrir, but he cannot stop Loki dreaming. 

He sits on a rock on the far side of the cave and watches his son romp, unhindered, for the moment, by the heavy chain that binds him. As always, he is tempted to lay magic on the links, but he knows it would be for naught. That chain was forged by dwarves and enchanted by Odin himself. Even his magic cannot break it. Even his magic cannot free his son. 

And then, just as Fenrir strikes the rodent down with a satisfied huff, the scent of smoke and fire returns, stronger than the last time. Loki inhales, smells burning flesh and wrinkles his nose. 

His wolf-son rips into flesh and the smell grows stronger still. 

Oh, Loki thinks, oh.

+

Werewolves were an accident, really. 

Fenrir’s children only in the sense that they were made of him, unintentional as it was. The bite of a magical being does strange things and the next time Loki looked, his son had companions, half man, half beast, who ran with him through the dark forests of Midgard. 

He finds them interesting, the duality of them, the struggle inside their chests, between civilization and animal instinct, between moral and wilderness. 

Yet, Loki has always maintained that he has nothing to do with them, but that is a lie. His son came from his magic and they came from his son’s. He is linked to them, distantly, but definitely, and he understands, when he smells death in Fenrir’s cage, that it is the dream of one such halflings he is slipping into.

He ignores it. 

Of course he does. 

So a little, mortal wolf is dreaming of fire. 

Why should Loki of Asgard care?

+

The next time, there are screams and no Fenrir in sight. Somehow, the little wolf’s dream is getting stronger. 

Loki ignores it. 

+

Two weeks later, ignoring has become impossible. 

After the scent and the sound came the sight, visions of flames licking at the edges of his vision and Loki finally, grudgingly accepts that his own magic, a living thing in its own right, is refusing to let him ignore this little wolf. 

It’s natural, in a way. Odin has his beasts, yes, but they are boring creatures, one-natured and ancient. Loki has always preferred the different, the exciting, the two-natured. His son, who is both Aas and wolf, his daughter, half alive, half dead, vampires and werewolves.

He feels kindred to them in ways he could all too easily explain, if he cared to dive into his own psyche deep enough, and it is logical that his magic would reach out to one of them.

Curiosity has always been his chief motivator. 

+

There is a house on fire, surrounded by dark, looming trees. 

Around the house, shadows slink, shapeless and evil, with teeth glinting in the firelight. 

Inside, screams. Women, men, children, some wolf, some human. They beg and threaten and, eventually, simply scream because they cannot not scream. 

One by one, they fall silent. The fire dims and, when the last scream fades, the house collapses onto itself in a shower of sparks.

Silence falls like a deep breath before the plunge and then the dream starts over. 

There is a house burning, surrounded by dark, looming trees. Inside, screams. 

Loki watches one cycle, two, five, slowly wanders the edges of the dream, looking for the dreamer. 

He finds him collapsed in a heap of leaves, most of his body burned beyond recognition, eyes bright blue and fixed on the inferno, even as his body shakes with shock, limbs curling in like a mummy’s. 

He cries. 

His face is so much raw flesh, his skin gone and blackened, and he still cries.

The cycle ends. 

The man disappears. 

A house on fire. Inside, screams. 

After about fifteen minutes, the ground heaves and breaks open. The man crawls out, skin smoking, limbs curling in like a mummy’s.

Loki peers down into the hole the man came from, finds a tunnel. 

A secret escape. 

A single survivor. 

The fire dies. The man disappears.

A house on fire. Inside, screams. 

Loki rolls his eyes and reaches toward the house with one hand, drawing out the little wolf dreaming all this. The man appears in a flash of green, burned but healing, a grotesque snarl on a half-human face. 

Immediately, he lunges for one of the shadow creatures.

“Be still,” Loki commands. “This is a dream.”

The man stills. His eyes glow an unearthly blue.

“It’s a memory,” comes the correction. The little wolf’s voice is surprisingly smooth. “My pack….”

Against his will, Loki feels sympathy. He does not offer condolences, just stands there, next to the little wolf, as his home and pack burn. 

When the cycle restarts, Loki’s magic keeps the mortal anchored outside and he heaves a great sigh, like a sob, relief and shame mingling in his scent as he realizes he won’t burn again. It’s the only sound he makes. 

They watch. 

+

The next night, Loki finds himself returning. He keeps the wolf from burning. 

And the next, and the next. 

Not always, not when he is busy, but when he has the time, he goes and saves the manwolf from his own memory.

He does not think about why, because the dream has long since stopped being interesting.

+

“I don’t know what’s worse,” the mortal says. It was noon when Loki went to bed for a well-deserved nap, but the fire was already there. He suspects it always is. “Being inside and burning, or being outside and watching.”

He shakes his head after a moment when Loki makes no move to answer. “I am the only one who survived. The only one. I should ….”

Ah. Guilt. Such a useless motivator. 

“Have died with them?” he asks. 

Shame. He thought this one might be interesting. Anyone able to withstand months of burning and still seem moderately sane ought to be at least interesting. But this is downright dull. 

Then the little wolf surprises him. “Avenge them,” he finishes. In his eternally-wolf eyes, something dark stirs. 

+

“I’m in a coma, I think. The fire… it must have damaged me too badly to heal.”

Loki nods, wisely, and keeps trying to fell one of the trees. It’s a test, to see how much he can change inside the dream. So far, anything that is not the little wolf proves immovable. 

He hacks his conjured axe into the trunk one more time, before the mortal shudders and snaps, “Stop that!”

With a grunt, Loki lets himself fall on his ass. This is boring. 

“Tell me about how you would avenge your pack,” he prompts, patting the ground next to him. 

+

He never asks the little wolf’s name. 

He isn’t sure why. 

He never tries to take him out of that unchangeable nightmare, either. 

They just sit, side by side, night after night, and watch the slaughter of an entire family until they dull to its effects.

The little wolf shapes his plans with words and hands and Loki listens. 

“I will save her for last,” the man says, eyes aglow. “She was the one, I _know_ she was the one who planned it all. And I’ll kill the others, everyone involved, slowly. So she’ll know I’m coming.”

Quaint.

“So she can prepare?”

“I want her to fight,” he snarls. 

He’s mad, under the veneer of victim and man, he’s utterly mad, sanity burned out of him along with all sense. What’s left is a clever mind and idle hands that held babies as they burned. 

Still, his plans are artless, simple and boring. 

Loki nods along. 

+

As Thor’s coronation draws closer, Loki has less and less time for sleep, much less dreamwalking into the little wolf’s nightmare.

The man doesn’t burn anymore without Loki’s presence, but he is still trapped with the burning house, the screams, the smells. 

In the dream, his eyes grow brighter and his teeth sharper every time Loki visits, humanity bleeding away in increments. 

Less man, more wolf. 

More monster. The wild parts of him are winning over the man-parts being eaten away by fire. Shifting balances.

Loki can relate. The balance in his own life is about to come crashing down in a glorious mess.

“If only I could _wake_ ,” the wolf muses, teeth glinting like those of the shadows surrounding the area. 

“Would you burn them?” Loki asks, half distracted with plans of infiltration and treason on Asgard. 

The wolf laughs. It sounds like a howl. “I would _eat_ them.”

+

(“Jesus fuck!” Stiles yells, jumping back from the table, but still staring at the pictures he unearthed, of empty chest cavities and missing limbs. “That never went into the reports!”)

+

“You are my son,” Odin says, and forgets that Loki is the god of lies, that he can _hear_ the truth under it, the deception, the lie, the trick. 

As he calls for the guards and has the Allfather rushed into his Sleeping chamber, he thinks of his own son, chained in rock, reduced to hunting small prey for entertainment in his eternal cage, thinks of himself, the unloved and unwanted, the _monster_.

He thinks of the little wolf with madness in his gaze and quaint, bloody vengeance on his mind and for the first time, he thinks _why not_?

Blunt and graceless, yes, but it works. 

+

Later, somewhere between the vault and the fall, Loki naps, just briefly, and finds his son’s creature, the burning wolf.

“Take it,” he orders, magic gathering in one hand, power enough for a jolt to wake the dead. 

The little wolf looks confused for a second, but Loki doesn’t explain, just slams his palm, full of power, flat into his chest, throwing him backwards and out of his prison.

With the dreamer gone, the dream breaks open around him and he glimpses, just briefly, a sterile, white room of healing. 

Good enough, he thinks, already preparing to wake.

At least one of them will have his justice. 

+

+


End file.
